435

   that's the number of games I have in my steam library, and I haven't played a single second of 172 of those. About 40% of all the games I own. An unacceptable situation. How did it come to this?
Well, I didn't buy most of them, the vast majority comes from Humble Bundle. Now a shadow of itself, Humble Bundle was a subscription based service where you would receive anywhere from 9 to 12 games per month, for 15$. All those games combined usually had an MSRP well above 100$, and there was always a AAA or two in each bundle, alongside older/indie titles. The best part was that the proceeds went to charity, and each month they partnered up with a different one. For a “late” gamer like myself – I had no computer or game console before I was 13 – it was god sent. I was subscribed for 26 months, from 2018 to 2021 and acquired about 256 games through this subscription. While I played the ones I was interested in at the time, the others were just left to rot in my library. I would estimate the proportion of games played to games rotting to be 30/70. On top of that, FOMO lead me to not cancel my subscription, despite seeing games accumulating beyond reason. Couple that with the fact that each time you tried to cancel, you were given the option to pause your subscription for months at a time, and I let the problem grow more than I should have. So this is how I ended in this predicament. After cancelling my subscription, I tried to tackle the problem.

​ On March 24th 2021, right after cancelling my subscription for good, I released the trailer for a new series of videos I was to produce for the Raddest youtube channel. For the uninitiated, Raddest was a group of friends out of Queen's University — I was a late addition to the group, so I can't really speak to its history — that at one point during covid, created a youtube channel. People of Raddest could post on the channel, and to combat by own boredom, I made some pretty frequent contributions, releasing a couple videos a week at one point. I had multiple series going on at a time, and “Humble Purge” was to be one of them. In this series, I would choose one game from my backlog, introduce it and play it for ~20 min giving my opinions and first impressions. Thinking back, I was setting myself up for failure. I didn't have enough motivation to play all the games in my backlog for like an hour, but I thought it would be a good idea to play for at least 20 min, while doing commentary, while discovering the game, spending an hour editing and doing audio processing, an hour rendering, taking the time to come up with a title and make a thumbnail and then waiting for an hour for it to upload... Delusional. So it failed, and I only produced 15 episodes in total, in the span of about a year, because I lacked both time and motivation. And thus, the first humble purge, a noble crusade, came to an end, barely making a dent in my backlog.

This is not the end of the story; around November I came across a video from DarylTalksGames titled “A Misguided Guide to Finishing Your Gaming Backlog” and its sequel “How I Finished My Gaming Backlog”. Those videos are exactly what they sound like they are about. And they rekindled my will to slay my backlog. Those videos didn't just provide me with the will, but also the means to do so. In his first video, Daryl explains his initial methodology and goal. He catalogued all the games in his backlog in an excel sheet, with some relevant information like the genre, how long it would take to beat, and how hyped he was to play it. I did the same, but in a google sheet, cause I'm poor. Those have been useful to plan my second assault on my backlog, but to be honest, I almost learned more from his second video. In it he explains why he initially failed, and here are my main takeaways from it: 1. Only play the games you really want to play. I took this advice and cut down my backlog from 150 to 109 games. I can always come back to the rest of the list when I'm done with this first part. 2. You don't have to finish the games. This was a big one for me, I've been a bit of a completionist in the past, even if the games were tedious and it was becoming a chore to finish them. This helped be re-framed the project from: “There are games that I haven't touched in my library that I have to finish because they are in my library” to “There are games in my library that I haven't touched that I could potentially enjoy for a while”. I went from maximising productivity to maximising fun, and in the end this makes this project more sustainable. Therefore, I set the only rule for this challenge: play 1h minimum. If I still don't dig it after that, I can set the game aside without remorse.

My framework was laid out for me. The main thing I am using to keep track of my progress is this google sheet. The sheet is updated every time I start/finish a game, feel free to check it out. There, you will see four tabs, the first two are the ones we are taking into consideration for this project, the others are more for when I'm done. Namely, games I want to replay, and games I want to buy — i.e. a real backlog.

In any case, the first sheet is all the games that I own on either steam, origin, uplay, epic :vomit and other. During this challenge, this list can grow, but under one specific rule: I can't buy games. Since the beginning of this project in December 2023 I added ~6 games, that I got for free either on epic, steam or prime. With those added, I got a bunch of info from all the games, the most important being the type of game, the time to complete, rating from steam and metacritic, and my hype to play it /10. I was ready to move on to the culling. The second sheet is all the games I will actually play during this purge; the selection process was pretty simple. Of that first sheet, I would add any games that had a hype above 5/10. But it didn't end there. I would also add any games that had a hype of 5/10 and steam score above 85% or metacritic above 75. For the games at 4/10, they would have to have steam ratings above 90% or metacritic scores above 80. Lastly, no matter the rating, any game with a steam score above 95% or metacritic above 85 would instantly be retained. Regardless of what I want to play, I'm not willing to miss cult classics. I was ready to start playing. I would divide my play time into games I would play at home, and games I would be able to play at the office. The latter category had to fit some narrow criteria, namely: be able to run on a toaster, be completely SFW and not require any attention if I had to drop it to actually work. End of December/ beginning of January are periods with a lot of downtime at work, so I decided to capitalise on that and started the challenge on Dec 3rd.

I was, at first, overwhelmed with choices, but I had prepared for this eventuality, and had a randomised game selector pick something for me. Monster Prom. I started the game, played for a bit, wrote my review, gave my rating. Didn't take too long, and I grew confident in my ability to finish this project within a year. Slay the Spire was next.

Yaaaouch!!! I had played card games and rogue-likes, but this one just hit the spot. I spent two weeks on this game, I had fun and I regret nothing. Thankfully, so far this is the only game I have devoted that much time to. After this little hiccup, I was able to enjoy games at a good pace, and as I am writing these words I have completed 23 games, roughly 21% of my backlog. Provided I don't find too many Slay the Spires, I should be able to finish this by the end of the year.

This is the big project touted in my December reading, and the excuse I had for only reading one (1) small book. With the project on its way and its motivation and methodology explained, I would like to extend an invitation. Clean your backlog, whether it's games that are rotting in your library — like me —, or games you've had on a list for six years that you are definitely coming around to playing — like DarylTalksGames. You don't even need to do all the research that I did from my google sheet, I learned recently that there are websites that do it for you. To spice it up, we can set a deadline of one year. I intended to release this article in December or on January 1st at the latest, but I got lazy. In any case, you would have until February 2025 to clear your backlog. I would love to hear about the games you played, which one were pleasant surprises and which ones weren't so much. Regardless, I will make an update article in December 2024, whether I am successful or not. See you then!

Thank you for reading my logorrhea, Eddie